An Author's Mind

An overflowing imagination supplies the material for Martin Farquhar Tupper's collection of essays and proposed books. Its opening presents an editor receiving a friend's blotty manuscript, written to clear a crowded mind of persistent ideas. The author then explains his wish to set down brief versions of plays, novels, tales and other works that keep forming in his head. Literary ambition, the relief of writing and the business of publication become subjects for a voice full of images and classical references.

The middle excerpt sketches a possible work on home, ranging from different kinds of dwellings to family life, poverty and parental authority. Plans for discussion sit beside social judgments, appeals for charity and comments on the reception of poetry. Readers interested in how a writer develops subjects can follow these compressed outlines and digressions, which show ideas being arranged and argued over before they become larger works.